Currently fiscal policies in Germany seem to be in a very comfortable position and the German Debt Brake is regarded as an institutional precondition for this success and has been exported to the Euro area in the guise of the Fiscal Compact. In this paper we scrutinize German fiscal policies and...

The Euro area is currently going through its worst period of recession and economic stagnation since the Great Depression and World War II. The article tries to give an impression of the extraordinary degree of fiscal austerity and the devastating economic effects it has already had and must be...

The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

The German debt brake is often regarded as a great success story, and has therefore served as a role model for the Euro area and its fiscal compact. In this paper we fundamentally criticize the debt brake. We show that (1) it suffers from serious shortcomings, and its success is far from certain...

Congress has expressed interest, one way or the other, in a balanced-budget requirement for the past six decades. Yet despite numerous attempts, the legislative body has never passed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment. Most of the analysis of why we don't yet have a constitutional...

Over 11 months of 2015, regional debt growth came to nearly 5% against the turn of the year. Municipal debt growth during the same period constituted 1.5%. By the period-end for the entire year, the debt volume will increase further. However, growth rates, most likely, will slow down compared to...

The euro crisis remains unresolved and the euro currency union incomplete and extraordinarily vulnerable. The euro regime’s essential flaw and ultimate source of vulnerability is the decoupling of central bank and treasury institutions in the euro currency union. We propose a “Euro...

A recent amendment in Pakistan’s federal constitution allows provinces to borrow domestically and abroad. There is a concern that it may generate unsustainable debt burden, considering the country’s delinquent monetary policy and a historical deficit bias. The objective of this paper is to...

We provide a systematic analysis of fiscal consolidation in a medium-scale dynamic general equilibrium model. Our results show that the choice of the consolidation instrument is very important, not only with respect to the short- and long-run output effects of the different consolidation...

This paper provides a set of detailed estimated fiscal reaction functions for a panel of twenty industrialized countries, and it discusses commonalities and differences with regard to systematic fiscal policies across countries. In general, the countries in the panel adjust tax revenues strongly...